


Conquests

by A Kiss of Fire (TigerDragon), Bright_Elen



Series: Prisons Without Bars [1]
Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Aftercare, Canon Compliant, F/F, First Time, Hospitals, Memory Alteration, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Not Happy Fluffy Tasty Bunnies, Original Character(s), Power Imbalance, Restraints, Scars, Sexual Coercion, Social Commentary, Stolen Moments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:59:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/A%20Kiss%20of%20Fire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bright_Elen/pseuds/Bright_Elen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss Everdeen has never thought of herself as anyone's property, not even after her reaping, but there's no denying that the Capitol has gotten its use out of her as bloody entertainment. When she left the arena - before they tried to take Peeta away - she thought that was all they wanted. But this is the Capitol, the heart of Panem, and when you win one game, you've just bought your way in to another one.</p><p>After all, winners are a valuable commodity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conquests

**Author's Note:**

> For the canonically curious, this scene slots neatly in at the bottom of page 350 of the first edition of _The Hunger Games_ and includes its own explanation of why it's not in the book. We've taken a couple of slight liberties here by filling in around the edges of canon (for instance, there's no evidence for or against President Snow having daughters except that he _does_ have a granddaughter, and we've invented a couple of pharmaceuticals), but for the most part we hope that this piece fits in the same tone and genre as the original.
> 
> Which, by the way, means you need to take our tags **very seriously.** This is not a nice story. It doesn't pretend to be.

I’m dreaming of Rue, bloodied and shrouded in flowers, when I come awake biting my lip bloody to hold in the rush of tears and the low agony sounds that I don’t dare show the cameras. My eyelids flick and flutter, trying to clear the vague yellow glow out of my vision that my dulled mind is screaming means I’m sun-drenched, a target, going to die, and then I smell the sharp antiseptic and feel the softness of the bedclothes against my bare skin.

I’m not in the arena anymore, lashed to a tree to keep from falling out or tucked in against Peeta in that little cave, watching and listening to him die by inches. We won.

I won. I’m alive.

I shift against the restraint band that my body’s already anticipating, already thinking about swearing at the walls again - futile or not, it makes me feel better sometimes, caught in this perpetual twilight while they feed me and mend me and polish my nails - and then my right arm moves freely, nothing plugged into it, and I’m suddenly still again, taut with a tension I can’t explain. My eyes blink all on their own, still dazzled, trying to adjust, and I think about calling out for Peeta.

“You’re smaller than you looked on the screens, Katniss Everdeen.”

My head snaps around to see who spoke and my body jerks against the band to try to get away, all reflex even before my mind catches up to that voice - a woman’s, unfamiliar, touched by that strange lilting pitch of the Capitol’s accent and the over-long _sss_ , but I don’t want to imitate or make fun of her voice because now that I hear it, I understand what Octavia and Flavius and Venia are mimicking. It doesn’t sound sing-song or silly. It sounds like a hunting bird’s call mixed in with a snake’s hiss. It sounds dangerous.

The dazzle finally clears from my eyes, and the black blot sitting at the foot of my bed starts to resolve itself into a woman’s body. I see the hair clearly first - long, ridiculously ornamentally long and only barely braided, so ebony black that it picks up faint blue highlights from the yellow light - and then the pale white arms, the glitter of carved silvery metal wrapped across the forearms like some sort of ceremonial armor, the long ivory throat and the clinging silken dress almost as black as the hair, so the two mingle together and with my eyes still blurry, it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other stops. The face comes into focus last, pieces at a time like one of those video composites - lips a crimson so dark that it’s almost black, the lipstick dipping in a clean narrow line down almost to her chin, narrow jaw, sharp cheekbones, delicate nose, black-line eyebrows, heavy black eyeliner that surrounds each eye and traces out almost to her temple on each side, a delicate curl descending like a fishhook from the left eye that stops just above the nose. Piercing gray eyes, pale, the same color as a hovercraft hull and somehow just as hard.

My eyes flick to the black half-dome on the wall I know the camera is sitting under.  “I lost some weight.”

“The camera’s off,” she offers, still studying me the way a hawk looks at a rabbit. It makes my skin itch. “All of them, in fact. The microphones, as well.” My face must give something away, because she laughs very softly in a way that doesn’t sound like any laughter I’ve ever heard before. There’s absolutely nothing warm about that laugh at all. “Don’t look so surprised, _gladiatora_. Not everything is for public view, after all.”

I try not to glare. What the hell is she planning? I force myself to relax, exhale slowly, and even risk faking a small smile. “I hate those things.”

“An unpleasant necessity of life,” she agrees, lifting a light plastic cup from the small table at the end of the bed and offering it to me. “Drink?”

Her nails are long, painted a strange dark metallic color that on second look I’m not even sure _is_ paint, and they look sharp.  It _looks_ like water, but it could be anything. I can’t help a dry swallow, but I shake my head. “No, thanks.”

“If I wanted you drugged,” she points out in a voice of sweet, deadly reason, “don’t you imagine that I’d have done it while you were sleeping?”

Even though there’s something about this stark woman that makes me think she’s as creepy as she looks, I can’t think of a reason she would come talk to me just to drug me. Besides, while I don’t feel any other symptoms of dehydration, I _want_ that drink pretty badly.

“Okay.”

She extends her hand enough for me to take the cup easily, and I have to force myself not to swallow it in greedy gulps that will make me sick sooner or later. The slow, careful sips are a kind of minor torture, and she just sits there watching me watch her. Maybe I ought to be used to being on display by now, but I’m not - this is different from the cameras, closer and more dangerous, and I can’t begin to imagine what she wants from me. That alone scares me, at least as much as I still have the ability to be scared. Maybe it’s the lingering aftereffects of the meds or maybe it’s just the eighteen days of being hunted, wounded, hungry, thirsty, furious and scared so bad I could barely feel it that leave me feeling drained of emotion. Peeta. I need to know he’s going to be on the train home. I need to hold Prim.

Maybe I should ask this woman on my bed about Peeta, but I don’t. I’m not sure I’d trust her answer, no matter what she told me, and I know I’d trust it less than the red-haired Avox who’s already told me he’s all right.  It’s not enough, but I have to see him myself to be sure. To know it’s real. She’s not going to help me do that - I don’t know how I know, but I do. I’m learning to listen to that whisper in me that has started to sound like Haymitch, and it tells me there’s nothing safe or helpful about the woman at the end of the bed.

 _Wait for the other shoe, sweetheart,_ it tells me.

“The burn on your calf,” she asks, eyes still intent. “May I see it, Katniss?”

It’s a strange moment to rediscover my modesty, after all the prodding and primping before the Games and the bloody, desperate, stripped-down reality of the arena, but caution and ‘Haymitch’s’ voice tell me that a woman who can have the cameras turned off in my hospital room isn’t one I should refuse. Besides, it’s just a scar, and she _might_ be a doctor.

_And I might be President, sweetheart, but I wouldn’t count on it._

I peel the sheet back carefully, exposing my calf and my knee but as little else as possible, and the roughened flesh is a dull red and white - less noticeable than it was after the ointment, but still a scar the size of my hand. She makes a soft, delighted sound and bends forward over my leg, reaching out with those sharp-tipped nails and slowly caressing the ridges and crevices of the scar, and her voice is a husky whisper that startles me because I don’t have any idea what it could mean. I’ve never heard anyone talk like that back home, or since I arrived here.

“It’s beautiful,” she tells me. “You applied my ointment perfectly.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, flatly. Why is she complimenting me for _that_? Do they have specialists to apply their own ointment for them here? “It wasn’t that hard.”

She laughs again, lower and throatier than before, and her palm comes to rest over the burn as she lifts her eyes to mine and takes one of my burn-welted hands. Those cool, delicately sharp nails trace across my scars - the old ones from hunting, the new ones from the arena - and she watches my eyes while she does it. My pulse jumps and shivers, and my cheeks burn. I don’t know why, either, except that there’s something uncomfortably intimate about the gesture. It’s not her enthusiasm alone - most people in the Capitol love the Games, and they only make me angry. Like my prep team, most of them aren’t cruel or malicious, just so shallow that they can’t see the tributes as real people.   

I get the sudden, clear feeling that for this woman, the tributes’ humanity is _why_ she loves the violence. She _likes_ the fact that I’m a murderer. I can’t help shrinking back a little.

“You don’t need to be frightened, _gladiatora_. I’m not going to hurt you.” Her lips curve in a way that reminds me of Glimmer, but she doesn’t let go of my hand. “And you’re not going to hurt me, either, because I have no less than three ways to summon Peacekeepers that require neither leaving the room or the use of my hands. Just so we both know where we stand.”

I bare my teeth in a grim smile. “Like I could forget where I am.”

“Of course not. You’re a clever girl, Katniss. I knew that from the moment I saw you shoot the apple.” Surprise must register on my face, because she laughs again - that low, husky sound that makes all the blood try to rush into my skin. “Oh, no, I wasn’t _there_. You’d have remembered me. But I was watching. I always watch the presentations. Sometimes the Gamemakers miss things in their ratings.”

Coming into my room, and now this. If she can ignore the Capitol’s rules, this woman is very dangerous indeed.

“Who are you?”

She laughs softly and turns my hand over, palm up, before I really realize that she’s doing it. Then she bends down and presses those dark crimson lips to my palm, and when the soft wetness of her tongue flicks across the callouses there, the rough patches that years of using my bow in the woods have etched into me, it’s everything I can do not to yank my hand away from her like she’s inflicted a fresh burn. I don’t know why I don’t, except that I’m not ready to cross this woman. Not yet.

“Minerva Theodora Snow, my dear Katniss. Very much delighted to meet you at last.”

I can’t flee, and I can’t fight. The only thing I can do is play along, and it makes me scream inside.

To distract myself, I concentrate on the new information. _Snow? A relative?_ Even looking as her closely, it’s hard to tell her age, especially with the Capitol makeup and rejuvenation technology available to her. She could be anywhere from eighteen to forty.

A daughter or granddaughter, then. I didn’t know the President had children, but I guess if I were him I wouldn’t tell anyone, either. Still, that means someone had to marry him, and that strains my mind just thinking about it. I do remember some mention in a schoolbook about his dear, departed wife. I wonder how she died, then decide I don’t want to even _think_ too hard about that with this woman in the room.

She’s still watching me, and she still hasn’t let go of my hand, and I’m not sure there’s an inch of skin left on it she hasn’t touched. Maybe she thinks so, too, because she lets go and reaches across me to take my other hand between both of hers. That gesture, I know, and it makes my blood run hot and cold.

Peeta touched my hand that way in the cave, while I was lying next to him and playing at  loving him for the cameras. But the look in her eyes now is hungry, and there’s none of Peeta’s kindness or warmth there.

“What do you want?” I ask her, even though my voice sounds more like ice and stone than my own.

The edge of her mouth curls up in a strange, small smile, and she reaches up with those glittering nails to brush them lightly through the dark, ragged strands of my hair. “Did you know, clever Katniss,” she murmurs in answer, “that in the old Roman Empire, long before the Dark Days, women of breeding would bid for the favors of the gladiators - their tributes?”

In the Seam, a lot of the girls get food from the Peacekeepers without putting their names in the drawing. For a price. Now I understand.

“So how much did I go for?” It comes out tired and bitter, because suddenly nothing about these people surprises me anymore, and then she smiles and somehow I know I’ve said the right thing. That she _wants_ to tell me how much she paid for me. Vanity? Something else? Whatever it is, it’s a weakness. A weapon. I need to remember it.

“Not as much as I won betting on you, my _gladiatora_ , but enough to buy a penthouse outright and furnish it in style. Of course, they closed the bidding after your dramatic demonstration of your devotion to your dear Peeta, so it might well have gone even higher if they hadn’t. Fortunately, I was able to prevail upon them to accept one last bid.”

“Because you’re Snow’s daughter.” Her gray eyes flash, and I know I’ve put a foot wrong, but it’s hard to care that I’ve hurt her precious feelings. Hard not to think about having this woman in the arena instead of Glimmer and Clove and Foxface.

I understand how people could do that to other people a little better now, too.

“Among other reasons,” she murmurs, just a little stiffly, and lifts my hand to her mouth again to run her lips over the half-faded welts of the burns. “It would be tiresome to explain. Suffice to say that they were prepared to be reasonable once I made my wishes clear.”

I snort a laugh. “Nothing here is reasonable.”

It’s a stupid thing to say, an invitation to trouble, but instead of being furious or calling the Peacekeepers, she just laughs and kisses my wrist. “Clever Katniss, indeed.”

She doesn’t move for a long moment, and all I want is to get this over with. “So? What are you waiting for?”

“I wanted to talk to you. Take my time. Enjoy you.” Her lip curves again in that thing that I’m not sure is a smile at all. “You’re more precious than gems, Katniss. The girl who was on fire, right here where I can touch her. Who would want to rush that?” She leans forward over me without letting go of my hand, the delicate points of her nails digging in at the back of my neck, and her lips slowly trace the puckered scar above my eyebrows.

Unexpectedly, the softness of her lips on my skin drives a hot pulse of electricity down from my head to my guts and... lower. My heart speeds up and I start to feel warm, and my breath catches before I can stop myself. I frown at her. “What did you give me?”

“Flora-7. A small dose. Just enough to make things physically easier for you.” She gives me the answer factually, calmly, without any trace of sentiment, and then touches her lips to my cheek in a way that makes me shiver again. This time, I can’t tell if it’s because I want to jerk away or not. “I’m not a cruel woman, Katniss.”

Somehow I believe her. Believe that she doesn’t intend to damage my body, anyway. And  compared to making me a murderer in front Panam and then applauding me for it, making me do _this_ isn’t likely to wake me up in the middle of the night. After all the blood and horror, the ugliness of this moment feels more like an echo than a fresh wound.

I feel warmer now, my skin almost tingling, and I decide to give in. It can’t be worse, some part of me that still has a bite whispers, than letting Flavius and Octavia and Venia rip all the hair out of my body just so I could look pretty before the slaughter.

She must see my face change, or maybe my eyes, because her voice drops out of that high, fluted tone and down into a murmur that seems to climb in under my skin like a violation of silk. “Beautiful Katniss,” she breathes into my ear, and then her nails are under my chin and she’s kissing me. It’s not like Peeta’s kisses. Her mouth is softer, and it tastes like roses and spices, and he never handled me like a trained pet when he kissed me. There’s a tempting, scary kind of helplessness to that - like falling asleep in the tree the moment the pain stopped, even with the Careers down below me just waiting to kill me. All I have to do, that touch promises, is not fight her. If I don’t fight her, it won’t hurt.

And it’s not just me I’m protecting. She could arrange whatever she wanted for Gale or Prim, or Peeta’s family.

So instead of fighting her, I fight my own impulses. I try to focus on the way my body feels and not how much my hands itch for my arrows or even my knife. I try to focus on the softness of her hair and the low, eager sounds she makes, because the same instinct in me that knows which way a doe is going to break when it runs understands that the better I am at this, the faster she’ll be satisfied. Then she’ll leave, and I’ll go back to sleep, and I’ll try to pretend that this didn’t happen even when Haymitch tries to ask me about it and winds up with another drink instead.

I fight, and I win, because I have to win to survive. Not so different from the arena, after all. There’s only one moment when I’m really in danger, when I’m sure I’m going to fail this test the way I almost failed the Gamemakers’ test before I thought to shoot the apple.

We’re kissing. She’s naked and over me, our bodies touching, and the delicate black filigree tattoos of tigers and hawks across her shoulders are moving with the slow bunch of her muscles as she touches me. The thin black gloves she’s wearing are tough, tough enough to turn the sharp points of her nails into a delicate glide, and they seem to warm themselves so that it’s easier and more pleasant when my body clenches around them. I can’t breathe, I feel feverish, and the way she’s smiling down at me makes me want to scream that I’m not a _meal_ , damn it.

Her fingers shift, pulling another sharp buck of my hips out of me, and she speaks for the first time in... I don’t know how long, now. A long time. Maybe forever. “Lovely, Katniss. Even your Peeta doesn’t know how lovely you are, how lovely you _can_ be, but I knew it from the moment I saw you shove your way out of that crowd and volunteer.” Her voice is low and urgent, heavy with excitement, but there’s something else in it, too. Something possessive and intimate that makes my body tighten in ways I can’t explain. “So brave. So clever. A survivor. Then I heard you promise your sister you’d win, and I knew you would. I knew. I bet everything the oddsmakers would take on you that night, and you’ve repaid me so perfectly. Incomparable. There won’t be another like you for ages, and you’re mine. My _gladiatora_. My Katniss.”

 _No,_ I think, _you don’t own me. Not you, not the Capitol, no one. Never._ “Yes,” I say, hoping that my heavy breathing makes it sound convincing.

There’s a sharp sound in her throat - pleasure, I’ve learned to recognize by now, and more intense than when she made me learn to use my mouth on her - and her fingers shift, curl and press in a way that sends a hot flash of sensation through my whole body. Like jumping into a pond, it’s the only thing that exists for the  moment it lasts. As glad as I am for the escape, my mind starts to race again almost immediately, searching for danger, waiting for the moment to act.

She doesn’t stop there, of course. That would be too easy. I’ve only got a shadow of the endurance I had before the arena, but she uses all but the last scrap of it.

I’m trembling and shaking and dizzy, when it’s finally done, and she settles down against me and strokes my hair gently, as if she cares, and that tempts some stupid part of me to cry. I won’t, though. I won’t cry for her. She’s had too much of me already, and I won’t give her that.

Her fingertips trace my calf again, feeling the scar there, and the question just comes out of me before I realize that I’m asking it. “They’re fading - they’ve been fading since the first day I woke up. Why didn’t you wait until...?”

“Until they were done erasing you from your own skin?” She laughs indulgently, pressing another kiss to my forehead, and shifts her arms around me in a way that puts my head against her shoulder. “You’re a clever girl, Katniss. You can tell me that.”

“Because you wanted them,” I tell her wearily, too exhausted to put any anger in the words. “To show I was really there. That I really killed Cato and Marvel and Glimmer and the girl from District 4. You’d have taken me with the blood and the dirt still on me if the doctors had let you.”

She chuckles softly, bending enough to kiss the scar above my eyebrows again, and I know I’m right.

“Did Haymitch know it was you? When you bought the medicine.” I’m not sure why I want to know, except that if he did, I can be angry with him.

“No. That would have been rather indiscreet of me, wouldn’t it?” She smiles and tucks my hair behind my ear, the one I’m only now getting used to having my hearing back in, and there’s something in the gesture that makes me think of Prim and Lady. “I used a shell ID to make the payment - an anonymous consortium. I’m sure he assumed it was a group of gamblers looking to better their chances of winning.”

“Why would you hide how rich you are?” I watch as she sits up, as she inspects each item of her clothing before starting to put any of it back on. “I thought everyone in the Capitol loved showing off.”

“My father doesn’t like us to interfere in the Games. He thinks it’s too encouraging to the Districts to know that my sisters and I might favor one of their tributes.” She laughs softly, lips curving in a smile that doesn’t quite show how bitter she is. I recognize it anyway. “Of course, as usual, what my father really means is that we aren’t to get _caught_ doing it.”

I snort again.

She chuckles as though I’ve said something funny, anyway. “Appearances are everything in the Capitol, my dear Katniss. Truth is a luxury that only the most powerful can afford. Not even my father can speak his mind and do as he pleases, not all the time.”

My eyes narrow into a glare. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It should,” she retorts as she seals herself into her dress, smiling at me as though the glare doesn’t disturb her at all. Maybe she’s used to being hated. I don’t know. “If my father _were_ free to do as he pleased, you’d be dead - you and your beloved Peeta both. Tragic failures of medicine to piece together your broken bodies after you gave your utmost for the Games. He loathes defiance.”

I open my mouth to say something angry, then pause. “You can’t mean that those empty-headed Capitol crowds actually matter. What could they be good for besides talking about themselves?”

“That is precisely what they are good for, my dear, and precisely why they matter.” She can see I don’t understand, and she sits back down on the bed in a way that tells me that she’s decided to humor me. Or maybe she just likes having someone to talk to. How many people, I wonder, does a daughter of the President have that she can speak _her_ mind to? Another weapon.

“No government, not even my father’s, can long endure without the consent of the governed,” she explains to me, as though I’ve asked why apples fall out of trees. “That consent can be bought, bullied, swindled or extorted, but it has to be given. One cannot shoot everyone, after all.”

 _You could,_ I think bitterly, _but then you’d have to actually do some work yourself._ “But why the people here? Why not just have the bare minimum of people you need here? The Districts do everything anyway.”

“The Districts do. The Capitol _is_.” She smiles at my frustration. “This is where the power is, my _gladiatora_. This is where the tools are, not just the hovercraft and the guns but the medicine and the broadcasting equipment and the dream of civilization. A rebellion in the Districts can be burned away, because one can always replace miners or farmers or craftsmen. But to suffer a rebellion here, in the Capitol? It would destroy the very thing that one needs to rule. One might as well try to save one’s own house by burning it down.”

It occurs to me that I would really, _really_ enjoy burning her house down. Almost at the same time, I realized that President Snow’s small lack of freedom is something I definitely shouldn’t know or think about.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask warily.

“Because I can. It’s been a long time since I had the opportunity to say whatever I felt like saying - longer than I suspect you can imagine - and it’s liberating.” She laughs softly, catching my hand with hers, and kisses my wrist again. “Ask me anything you like, Katniss. Anything at all.”

I look at her closely. “You aren’t worried I’ll talk?”

“Not in the least.” She catches the sudden flicker of fear on my face and shakes her head, reaching up to cup my face with the hand that isn’t holding mine. “Don’t worry, my exquisite Katniss. You won’t suffer any ‘accidents’ on my account.”

I notice she isn’t promising that there will be no accidents at all.

“There’s no point, anyway. Nothing is going to change.” The words stick in my throat like I don't want to say them, but what else is there to say?

She smiles, then, as though I’ve said something funny, and then she kisses my mouth again lightly and reaches for the narrow black boots with the high heels that she was wearing under the dress. They look hideously uncomfortable, even compared to the heels Effie likes, and I can’t imagine how she stands walking around in them. She must see me looking, because she pauses and holds them up, and then she chuckles softly and arches an eyebrow at me. “Wondering about my wardrobe?”

I wasn’t, exactly, but even as tired as I am, it doesn’t seem smart to say that. So I just shrug. “I thought everyone in the Capitol wanted to wear as many colors as possible.”

“It’s a way to make yourself memorable, which is how you gain in status,” she affirms. Then she catches my look and laughs softly. “But I’m not dramatic enough to compete. Is that what you’re wondering about, Katniss?”

I nod, finally pulling the sheets up around me again. It’s good to be covered, even as little as that.

“In a city full of peacocks and magpies and jays,” she asks me as she pulls the elaborately engraved, silvery bracers back across her arms and locks each of them in place with a touch of a glittering fingertip, “what could be more distinctive than a raven?”

I nod. She’s almost done dressing. I just want to be left alone.

“I thought of asking you to stay, of course. Promising to look after your mother and spare your sister from the reaping if you’d consent to remaining in the Capitol as my... companion.” The thought makes my insides clench, and even the promise isn’t tempting. I wouldn’t trust anyone but myself or Gale to look after Prim, anyway. I must give my reaction away somehow, because she chuckles and shakes her head as though she might have expected a no. Then again, after the nightlock berries, maybe anyone would have. “But it would rather spoil the story of your romance with your rustic baker’s son, wouldn’t it?”

If that’s the case, he must be all right. I relax a little, even give her a faint smile. “I’d look terrible in Capitol makeup, anyway.”

She laughs, voice bright and sharp and hissing again, then shakes her head. “I’d never dress you in such dross,” she tells me, as though explaining something very important. “Leather and armor, as befits a huntress, and just a hint of shadow to bring out those eyes. And your weapons, of course.”

“They’re tools, not accessories.” I can’t keep the scorn out of my voice.

“I know.” She smiles, or at least does something with her lips that most people would call a smile if they couldn’t see her eyes. “I’d find a use for them, just like I’d find a use for you.”

My stomach tries to drop through the bed, and I have to bite the inside of my mouth to keep control. I say nothing, hoping she’ll interpret my silence as something she wants to hear.

“How close would you need to get, my dear Katniss,” she says, almost in a whisper, “to feather my father with one of those arrows? In the eye, of course. Properly.”

As much as I want her gone, it’s a nice fantasy, and I can’t resist. “Depends on the wind. Between fifty and a hundred yards, give or take.”

“Our balconies at the country estate are closer than that. You’d only need one shot, wouldn’t you?” Her eyes don’t leave mine, and now I can’t tell if she’s sharing a fantasy with me or genuinely asking a question.

No point in false modesty. “Yes.”

“Pity you won’t stay, then.” She reaches up and brushes her fingers along the upper curve of one of the bracers, metal over metal, but I hardly notice. The clear, cold, pale gray of her eyes seems to take up the whole world.

I feel myself slipping into unconsciousness. I hate the idea of falling asleep in front of her, even though I won’t really be more vulnerable than I already am. “I guess nobody likes him, do they?”

“Who could?” She laughs again, very softly, and keeps watching my eyes even when they’re too heavy for me to keep open for more than a few seconds at a time. “I’d suggest you rethink my offer, after you get home, but since you won’t remember it, there’s no point.”

“You drugged me again.” It’s hard to sound indignant when you’re almost asleep, and I’m not really trying. It’s like being angry at a cloud for the rain - pointless.

“I drugged you before you woke up. Not just the Flora. Reverie, as well. You won’t remember me at all, except perhaps for the length of a dream.” She draws close again, close enough to kiss my lips one more time, and I can’t seem to move enough to get away from it. “But I’ll remember you, Katniss Everdeen, my _gladiatoria_. You may be certain of that.”

My eyes close again, for the last time, and I wonder if this is what drowning feels like. Then I’m past worry or fear or stubbornness. Past anything at all.

When I wake up, my mouth tastes strange - roses and spice and something else - and the tubes are in my arm, the restraint around my waist, one of the mute attendants already lifting my bed to a sitting position so I can be fed. I feel, vaguely, as though someone else ought to be in the room. As though I’d glad they’re not.

I can’t remember why, and I’m not awake long enough to try to figure it out before the cool drugs from the IV send me drifting off again.

 


End file.
